Mastery Week: 13 Resources for Assessment in CBE Environments

Competency-based education (CBE, often also called mastery-based education) systems--those in which students “move on when ready” rather than “when the calendar or grade level says it’s time to”--hold the potential to create learning that is truly personalized and equitable for all students. By focusing on providing each student with the support they need, when they need it, to progress to their next step--whatever that step may be for them--our education system could better support more students in reaching their full potential.

However, we collectively still have a ways to go before this can become a reality--new forms of transcripts, new edtech tools, and new approaches and priorities for guidance are needed before many schools, districts and states will be able to face these challenges. On top of these logistical challenges lie many conceptual ones. What competencies should be prioritized? How can schools pressed for resources make this big shift effectively? What cultural aspects should leaders prioritize?

One fundamental question often at the front of this discussion is how to actually assess learning in competency-based environments. There has to be a way, but how? What measures and outcomes should be prioritized? What tools exist to measure them? This year, Springpoint’s annual Mastery Week focused on assessment, and the community came together to share out some great resources. Here, as a send off, we’ve compiled some new ones we’ve come across through Mastery Week, as well as some that we’ve seen around (or released ourselves) in the past that you may not have seen.

The "Show Me" Grading System of the Future. How do you report and assess on this kind of learning? What grade should individual students receive? Do students all receive a cumulative mark? Where is the place on the report card for the invaluable skills they gained in the process? Here, Getting Smart Columnist Kyle Wagner describes 5 steps to developing assessment of experiential learning.

Buck Institute for Education Rubrics. BIE’s collection of rubrics are primarily targeted at PBL, but can provide some great food for thought in terms of thinking through the more nebulous aspects of measuring and tracking learning pathways when “traditional test scores” might not get the job done.

ImBlaze: Igniting Powerful Real-World Learning Experiences. Getting Smart Columnist Erin Gohl here discusses Big Picture Learning’s internship and real-world learning LMS. “ImBlaze has made it possible for other schools to take internships to scale without increasing the burden,” she says. “The system empowers all parties to assess the quality and overall impact of individual internship and mentor experience, aggregate responses by participant descriptors, and enable analytics across placements and years.”

Thought Pieces and Case Studies

A New Model of Student Assessment for the 21st Century. This case study from American Youth Policy Forum challenges long-established practices and offers districts possibilities for improving secondary education outcomes by rethinking their understanding of academic success and transforming the structure and tracking of student achievement. “Hundred-year-old structural mechanisms designed to draw academic distinctions among students have become powerful structural barriers to academic achievement for a significant number of students in today’s urban high schools,” the brief argues.

The Future of Testing. Our current model of testing persists precisely because it so effectively delivers on machine-age promises of reliability and efficiency at a large scale. But these benefits come at a cost: the fixed content and rigid testing conditions severely constrain the skills and knowledge that can be assessed. Here, Getting Smart Columnist William Bryant looks at how those dynamics could change.

Creating Systems of Assessment for Deeper Learning. “New systems of curriculum, assessment, and accountability will be needed to ensure that students are given the opportunities to learn what they need to be truly ready to succeed in college and careers,” argues this report from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. The report explores systems and structures that support assessment of deeper learning and broader competencies than those traditionally measured in academics.

We’ve got a lot to digest after this week of learning about mastery assessment, and will be looking forward to joining again next year to continue learning from--and sharing with--the Mastery Week community.